Google bought Nest Labs earlier this month for a solid $3.2 billion in cash and according to a new report from TechCrunch, Google's new Nest team will be the search giant's core hardware group. That means Nest won't just be used for home automation and energy monitoring -- the team will be in charge of Google's latest hardware, which could include smartphones and tablets for Google's Android mobile operating system.

Google will keep the Nest team intact, including Nest CEO Tony Fadell. Fadell, who used to work for Apple on the iPod as well as the iPhone development teams, is considered a top dog when it comes to hardware -- but he's also comfortable with software.

TechCrunch said Google was looking for the right product designers and engineers who could cross between both hardware and software, and saw that in Nest.

[SOURCE: Digital Trends]

While Google will likely have its new hardware team work on home-automated devices as well, many reports say the Nest guys will take over all hardware projects spanning many kinds of devices. It's currently unclear what those devices will be.

It's interesting to see that Google sold off Motorola Mobility the same month that it acquired Nest. Many have concluded that Google originally acquired Motorola with the same intentions as when it acquired Nest; to have an innovative hardware team to power Android devices and beyond.

Google ended up selling Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion earlier this week, reportedly taking a $7 billion net loss on the company.

But Google got to hold onto Motorola's patents, which is likely what it acquired the company for anyway. Now, armed with patents and a whole new hardware team, we'll have to wait and see what Google does next.

Google just posted its Q4 2013 financials, posting a significant rise in revenue from $14.42 billion USD in Q4 2012 to $16.86 billion USD in Q4 2013. Analysts expected $16.75 billion USD. But net income (GAAP) was at $4.10 billion USD ($12.01 USD/share), which is up roughly 15 percent year-over-year, but represents 1.5 percent less than the $4.16 billion USD ($12.20 USD/share) than Thomson Reuters predicted.

The privacy concern is the biggest issue to a lot of people, and being that it is the privacy of sensitive data handled by a monstrous data mining company like google doesn't help alleviate anyone's concerns. It's not an impossible scenario that these will become very low cost to free so google can have an secondary (or fiftieth) entry point into their 'customer's' lives.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer